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Virtual Reality Tech and Openness
An anonymous reader writes: An article written by Kyle Orland looks at how the nascent virtual reality industry will handle openness — in terms of standards, platforms, source code, and development. "Whether any single VR platform is 'open' or not, though, may be moot if developers have to juggle countless slightly different development standards for countless slightly different VR platforms. In a way, making a PC game that only works on the Oculus Rift is as ridiculous as making a PC game that only works on Dell monitors." Right now, the major players in VR tech are using different approaches. Oculus is distributing a closed-license SDK. Valve is setting up a more open platform that lets multiple manufacturers build devices for it. The downside is that it doesn't seem to work as well, particular with Oculus hardware. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey says standards are going to take time and cooperation. Of course, that tune may change when devices start hitting the market.
They want to lock down standards and own the market. But the market will go to the standard with the most support, and open standards have a way of doing that better. That is how the PC won, even if IBM didn't. I am betting Google or Steam may end up the dominant player.
there are a number of well established Web3D/VR standards.
The two that come to mind are X3D (successor to VRML) and WebGL:
www.web3d.org and www.khronos.org/webgl/
rgds Dave
OK, look at the companies competing, look at their history.
They love inventing their own closed standards that no one else can access.
This industry, perhaps even humanity as a whole, has no collective memory whatsoever.
So, what will happen is that everybody will do these embrace-extend-extinguish tactics that Microsoft used in the early days. The market will be flooded with essentially proprietary, "closed source" systems and SDK licenses, and only the big boys get to play.
Then, lo and behold, somebody will discover standards that already exist (thank you, user davemurphy), and there will be a mass epiphany (ala latter day Microsoft) a proletariat "maker", "Indy" movement will spring up and begin to flourish, the companies will suddenly notice all the money they left on the table, and they will make a big ballyhoo about playing nice with standards and open sourcing everything, ...blah blah blah.
If we already know how this ends, can't we just start from there already and save everybody YEARS of work? PLEASE??? Oh wait, that wouldn't allow enough time for a select handful of individuals, who were in the right place at the right time to become multi-gazillionaires. Puh, what was I thinking.
We don't have to look far to see how what are called "open standards" actually aren't open at all.
Let's start with modern Web standards. They're paraded around as some of the most "open" of the open standards. Yet realistically, unless you're directly affiliated with one of Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, and maybe Opera, you won't really be able to have any meaningful impact on the standard of these directions.
That's not "open" to me!
It's similar when it comes to Linux init systems. Systemd is now the standard init system on the major Linux distros. Even though it is open source software, it's still not the kind of standard that its users can have much say over. The vendor decides how it's going to work, what it's going to do, and everyone else who uses it has no choice but to submit to it.
I'd only consider a standard open if it was possible to contribute to it like it is possible to contribute to Rust. It has almost 1100 contributors! That is openness! Average users can really make a difference when they contribute to Rust.
In the early days of the PC market, you actually did tend to write for a specific monitor. More precisely, you had a standard for the hardware interconncetions.
You had MDA, CGA, then EGA, then VGA. Parallel to that you had the Hercules graphics. After that you began seeing many SVGA adapters and the standards began to become more important. In the meantime, not all monitors could connect to the same device. The MDA, CGA, EGA, and Hercules all had the same kind of connector, but not every monitor could support all of the modes. The VGA and SVGA had different connectors. You often found that WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and CAD programs would include drivers for the graphics cards explicitly because DOS did not handle graphics.
Now we are in the early days of VR. I expect something similar to happen in which a "killer app" for VR will have drivers written for it by the graphics companies selling the VR technology. As the field matures, it will standardize on particular resolutions, color depths, refresh rates, etc. When standardization comes, you still might have different platforms, though (you could hook your Dell monitor to a cable box or an X Box and both will display, but the content and how it got there may be different).
Fuck systemd
Dump Linux bc of systemd forced march
No mention of OSVR.
Price. That is the standard. Most people won't look beyond it, and will gladly accept inferior tech.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
https://xkcd.com/927/
In a way, making a PC game that only works on the Oculus Rift is as ridiculous as making ax Xbox game that only works on Xboxes.
This is no different than the PS4 and XBONE. Both run a crap os on similar crap hardware, where the generation before that had 2 completely different sets of metal and language. Developers still had to port games. Now, while the 2 consoles are still slightly different from eachother, they are close enough that platform exclusives are far less likely.
Why can't there be 3 or more VR sets to choose from? Sure some devs will like working with vr set X over vr set Y, just like some developers like working with Nintendo and some would rather fall off a cliff. That's competition for you, baby.